“media”

For the longest time back in Mexico I had this idea of turning one of the rooms in the house into a media room but I could never explain, let alone convince, anyone else in the house. I  was thus happily surprised with this article in the NYT on how pimped up, hi-tech rec rooms are coming into their own. The encroachment of media—technology mediated culture—on our civilization, and particularly our generation, is nothing short of amazing.

SeeqPod (YubNub’s “seeq“) crawls the web for mp3’s and streams (and queues) them for you right along search results. “Playable search” they call it, hinting they’ll use the word in expansive, unexpected ways. It’s kind of how you can now play YouTube videos within Google results. The instant gratification level of it all is sky-high. It’s long due and as clever a copyright hack as I’ve seen (like how music websites link to YouTube videos to play music but so much better). A big, dark underweb of mp3s has always been there, it’s just never been this discoverable, this sampleable.

I learned about it, btw, through one of the classiest, most elegant, best targeted spams ever. The SeeqPod team sent me a (probably automatic) email recommending me to try searching for Rufus Wrainwright through their search engine. Since their spam was so unusually well-written and targeted (I had written about Rufus Wainwright before), I tried it. Maybe in these days were spam filters are so effective spammers will have to resource to being useful and wanted. We can dream.

Update 11/Dec/07

Project Playlist (YubNub’s “projp“) is a very similar website, though SeeqPod’s interface is much better. One interesting feature of Project Playlist is that you can search other people’s playlists too, which is a great way to find similar music. SeeqPod, on the other hand, has the interesting “discover” feature, which recommends similar music. (Via Chepe.)

Herbal Essences has always been one of the prettiest shampoos out there but their new color me happy line is something else. Not only is the industrial (blobjecty^WP) and graphic (modern art noveau) design stunning, their personified, casual copy is like nothing I’ve seen before. Fascinating.

It’s because they’re so bad.

Some days ago I bought my first manga^WP on a whim (Kare Kano^{WP, IH} and Furuba^{WP, IH}). I couldn’t believe my eyes reading them. They were so bad, so unlike any other comic I had seen.

They were black and white, with extremely simple, sketchy, cartoonish drawing—much of it seemingly left undone, symbols almost. Text was everywhere, sometimes in sketchy balloons, often not, often pointing (pointing!) cutely at things in tiny, jokey blurbs. Personal, painfully amateurish messages from the author were interspersed along the text (“As I’m writing this, I’ve been cutting my hand on the paper a lot.”). There were patterns instead of scenery, when there was any scenery at all. Long shots took entire panels, empty and mood-setting. Panels felt like paragraphs instead of pigeonholes and drawings flowed in and out of them, below and atop. By far, most panels were filled with people interacting, their faces and expressions. Closeups were everywhere. Everything was just so loose, so personal, so free, so bad.

That multimedia brings subjects “alive” is a painfully false cliche these days. For me at least. Maybe I’m just disappointed by the yawning gap between promise and (often gratuitous) delivery. Maybe I’m still too word-centric.

Thus my surprise with this animation of that most famous embroidered account of the 1066 Norman invasion of England (→), the Bayeaux Tapestry^WP. It’s so simple and yet so stunningly effective. (Though of course I have a sweet spot for animated tapestries…)

I can’t watch it without wondering what its weavers at the turn of the first millennium would say if they could look at their creations now.

(via Very Short List, which neatly sums up the work with a Venn diagram—as is their intriguing custom—, )

Which is quite bewildering. But, seriously, right.

(Shonda^{WP, T, IY}, of course, is Grey’s Anatomy’s demiurge^WP.)

Most people don’t even know about it but right at the bottom of the left sidebar of every pedia there’s an in other languages section that turns out to be one of Wikipedia’s pearls.

• the mathematical concepts of an upper bound (mayorante in Spanish), a set (insiemi in Italian) or a tuple (n-uplet in French);
  


• computer concepts like scrollbar (Bildlauf in German; literally, imagecourse), web browser (navigateur web in French; literally, web navigator), hyperlink (collegamento ipertestuale in Italian), real-time (Echtzeit in German), multimedia (multimedialità in Italian), and operating system (système d’exploitation in French);
  


• relatively unknown Greek gods like Cybele (Cibeles^CB in Spanish) or Priapus (Priape in French);
  


• exotic (anything really)
  
  
  • animals like the civet (Schleichkatzen in German) and the platypus (ornitorinco in Spanish);
    
  
  
  • fruits like the passion fruit (maracujá in Portuguese) and the jackfruit (yaca in Spanish);
    
  
  
  • plants like the okra (gombo in French), the  spearmint (yerbabuena in Spanish; literally, goodgrass), the mandrake (mandragora in Spanish), and the  jimson weed (higuera del infierno in Spanish; literally, infernal fig);
    
  
  
  • flowers like the fuchsia (bellebloem in Nedersaksisch^WP), the medlar (níspero in Spanish), and the saffron (azafrán) in Spanish);
    
  
  


• neologisms like meme meme (mème in French), GM food (alimento transgénico in Spanish), and the long tail (longue traîne in French, sometimes longue queue);
  


• international phrases like to be, or not to be (Sein oder Nichtsein in German) and Land of the Rising Sun (La Tierra del Sol Naciente in Spanish);
  


• digital accoutrements like inkjet printer (Tintenstrahldrucker in German), touchpad (pavé tactile in French), or flatbed scanner (escáner plano in Spanish; literally, flat scanner);
  


• drug paraphernalia/jargon like chillum (chiloom in Italian), syringe driver (Spritzenpumpe in German), rolling machine (interpercolatrice in Italian), bong (pipe à eau in French), and withdrawal syndrome (síndrome de abstinencia in Spanish);
  


• translatable acronyms like NAFTA (TLC in Spanish), NATO (OTAN in French), USSR (CCCP in Russian), or GDP (BIP in German);
  


• or simply peculiar expressions like popular science (divulgación científica in Spanish; literally, scientific divulgation), conspicuous consumption (prangende forbruk in Norwegian), prince charming (príncipe azul in Spanish; literally, blue prince), intellectual property (immaterialrätt in Swedish; literally, immaterial rights), apple of discord (Zankapfel in German), or noble savage (buen salvaje in Spanish; literally, good savage).
  

This was originally appended to the original lonelygirl article some weeks ago. I’m moving it to the blog strip^ELZR itself because I doubt anyone noticed it.

It’s frighteningly fast how the avant-garde becomes the status quo. Not long ago Google was an underdog. It is now unarguably a behemoth. (“Google is the weather.”^EEM) Two months ago it payed 1.65 billion for YouTube, the new media underdog. Now lonelygirl15, YouTube’s first star, has made the cover of this month’s Wired. And her article, The Secret World of Lonelygirl, is a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at how it all started. From Jessica Rose’s misgivings about the shady project, to her browseresque beauty, to lonelygirl’s origin as the alter ego of a commune-raised, bullied boy.

Jessica Rose was suspicious and frankly a little pissed off. She had come to this organic-tea shop to discuss what she thought was a feature film called Children of Anchor Cove. Now Beckett and Flinders had made her sign a nondisclosure agreement and, clearly pleased with themselves, told her that they wanted her to play the lead in what they billed as the future of entertainment. For free. It was an Internet-something-or-other –- she wasn’t listening. They were also going to “hire” another actor to play a character named Daniel. It sounded a lot like porn.

It was exactly what her acting coaches at Universal Studios’ film program had warned her against: unkempt producer-types hawking shady deals.

When he got to college, Flinders [cocreator of lonelygirl] dreamed up an alter ego—an awkward, geeky homeschooled girl. As a camp counselor, he told fireside tales about her experiences. He wrote short stories about her, and when he tried to make it as a writer in Hollywood, he put her in his screenplays.

There’s something about Jessica Rose that the webcam loves. Her distractingly large eyebrows and small round face are bent and stretched by the fish-eye lens into a morsel of beauty that fits perfectly in a pop-up window. That’s not to say she isn’t pretty off camera—she is—but every step she takes closer to the cam multiplies and enhances her looks. It’s a face made for the browser screen.

[Miles] Beckett was at home trying to decompress. He had been working as an urgent care doctor to pay the rent and was exhausted. Between filming and editing the Lonelygirl15 series and dealing with severed fingers and dog bites at the hospital, he wasn’t sleeping much. It didn’t help that Goodfried called at 2 am.

”Miles, it’s time you quit being a doctor,” he said. “We just passed 200,000 views.”

Within 48 hours, the video had half a million views. Goodfried knew that to be considered a success, a cable television show needs to get between 300,000 and 500,000 viewers. “My Parents Suck …” had vaulted into that territory.

Each episode needs to be short, no more than three minutes. ”You wouldn’t show a sitcom at a movie theater, right?” Beckett says. “You make movies for the big screen, sitcoms for TV, and something else entirely for the Internet. That’s the lesson of Lonelygirl15.”

This Web series not only looks different, it’s made differently than other filmed entertainment. As Bree’s universe expands, each new character will have his or her own vlog. Flinders can’t write and film them all, so new writer-directors have been hired and paired with actors playing the new characters. Unlike television, where writers sit in a room and come up with a single script, the Lonelygirl15 team comes up with a general plotline and then sends its writer-directors out to produce independent but interconnected videos. All the characters, in essence, have their own show.

Rose leaps onto the bed and jumps up and down. She makes faces at the camera and waves her hands, knocking askew the picture of the rose hanging on the wall. Beckett got it at a 99-cent store because it was cheap and looked like something a teenage girl would buy. Nobody seems to have noticed the faint pink quotation printed beneath the flower: ”It is by believing in roses that one brings them to bloom.” 

I loved Little Miss Sunshine^{WP, IMDB}! Deeply. Hadn’t had this fun with a movie in years. Please do go watch it. Now. (Particularly if you live here in Guadalajara. I doubt it’ll be on theaters beyond this week—there are some 7 people per screening.)

Why read David Friedman’s Machinery of Freedom^AM: